already 'mentioned' the year before. Why was this verdict not confirmed
by the jury? Because the artist was a foreigner? Who knows? Perhaps
because of her wealth. This injustice made her suffer, and she
endeavored--the noble child--to avenge herself by redoubling her efforts.

"In one hour I saw there twenty canvases commenced; a hundred
designs--drawings, painted studies, the cast of a statue, portraits which
suggested to me the name of Frans Hals, scenes made from life in the
open streets; notably one large sketch of a landscape--the October mist
on the shore, the trees half stripped, big yellow leaves strewing the
ground. In a word, works in which is incessantly sought, or more often
asserts itself, the sentiment of the sincerest and most original art, and
of the most personal talent."

Mathilde Blind, in her "Study of Marie Bashkirtseff," says: "Marie loved
to recall Balzac's questionable definition that the genius of observation
is almost the whole of human genius. It was natural it should please her,
since it was the most conspicuous of her many gifts. As we might expect,
therefore, she was especially successful as a portrait painter, for she
had a knack of catching her sitter's likeness with the bloom of nature
yet fresh upon it. All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we
realize their character at a glance. Look, for example, at her portrait
of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid
gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all his
white teeth; and then at the head and bust of a Spanish convict, painted
from life at the prison in Granada. Compare that embodiment of
fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like eyes haunt you with
their sadly stunted look. What observation is shown in the painting of
those heavily bulging lips, which express weakness rather than wickedness
of disposition--in those coarse hands engaged in the feminine occupation